0

I need an AWS EC2 instance constantly on for 1 month and I am looking at alternatives to the normal on-demand price.

There are articles out there describing how to choose a 2nd hand Reserved Instance in the Reserved Instance Marketplace https://www.metricly.com/aws-reserved-instance-marketplace/ or a very old AWS blog post https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-reserved-instance-marketplace/

But I cannot never find any! There is never a cheaper Reserved Instance showing "3rd party" as Seller, or a duration shorter than AWS's minimum of 12 months. And I am flexible about the Instance Type, but I can't select more than one in the dropdown. I don't see myself checking this every day, changing the dropdown (which has 100s of items) and clicking Search each time. enter image description here

Is there a better way?

Thierry_S
  • 201
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
    If you only need it for a month on-demand may be best. Reserved instances you might get a good discount but if there's 6 months to run you'll pay more than just on-demand. Spot is an option but that can terminate at any time. – Tim Feb 05 '21 at 19:56

1 Answers1

1

Using the AWS CLI, I run this command

call aws ec2 describe-reserved-instances-offerings --availability-zone us-east-1b --filters Name=marketplace,Values=true

https://awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/reference/ec2/describe-reserved-instances-offerings.html

It takes forever to run (more than 5mins). The output is below. This seems to indicate there are only two 2nd hand reserved instances in the whole of us-east-1b? weird. I hope there's a bug, or a timeout, or something wrong with my command.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                   DescribeReservedInstancesOfferings                    |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
||                      ReservedInstancesOfferings                       ||
|+------------------------------+----------------------------------------+|
||  AvailabilityZone            |  us-east-1b                            ||
||  CurrencyCode                |  USD                                   ||
||  Duration                    |  36288000                              ||
||  FixedPrice                  |  218.75                                ||
||  InstanceTenancy             |  default                               ||
||  InstanceType                |  m1.small                              ||
||  Marketplace                 |  True                                  ||
||  OfferingClass               |  standard                              ||
||  OfferingType                |  All Upfront                           ||
||  ProductDescription          |  SUSE Linux                            ||
||  ReservedInstancesOfferingId |  af1959a7-f884-4781-a8d8-25719911daf7  ||
||  Scope                       |  Availability Zone                     ||
||  UsagePrice                  |  0.0                                   ||
|+------------------------------+----------------------------------------+|
|||                           PricingDetails                            |||
||+--------------------------------+------------------------------------+||
|||  Count                         |  1                                 |||
|||  Price                         |  218.75                            |||
||+--------------------------------+------------------------------------+||
|||                          RecurringCharges                           |||
||+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+||
|||  Amount                              |  0.0                         |||
|||  Frequency                           |  Hourly                      |||
||+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+||
||                      ReservedInstancesOfferings                       ||
|+------------------------------+----------------------------------------+|
||  AvailabilityZone            |  us-east-1b                            ||
||  CurrencyCode                |  USD                                   ||
||  Duration                    |  2592000                               ||
||  FixedPrice                  |  58.75                                 ||
||  InstanceTenancy             |  dedicated                             ||
||  InstanceType                |  c4.2xlarge                            ||
||  Marketplace                 |  True                                  ||
||  OfferingClass               |  standard                              ||
||  OfferingType                |  No Upfront                            ||
||  ProductDescription          |  Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)               ||
||  ReservedInstancesOfferingId |  73fc138d-d536-4806-b2a3-2cd05752240e  ||
||  Scope                       |  Availability Zone                     ||
||  UsagePrice                  |  0.0                                   ||
|+------------------------------+----------------------------------------+|
|||                           PricingDetails                            |||
||+---------------------------------+-----------------------------------+||
|||  Count                          |  1                                |||
|||  Price                          |  58.75                            |||
||+---------------------------------+-----------------------------------+||
|||                          RecurringCharges                           |||
||+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+||
|||  Amount                              |  0.195                       |||
|||  Frequency                           |  Hourly                      |||
||+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+||
Thierry_S
  • 201
  • 1
  • 1